Art, television, theatre and film predictions for 2017

Art attack: Bolshevik, 1920, by Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev, showing as part of Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932 at the Royal Academy

31 December 2016 • 6:45pm

Telegraph culture critics offer up their predictions for 2017, including the continued rise of on demand TV and the best art exhibitions, theatre and films to look forward to in the coming year.

On demand TV in 2017: Anne of Green Gables, American Gods and JK Rowling's Strike Series

By Ben Lawrence, Telegraph TV and radio correspondent

If 2016 was the year in which our viewing habits were revolutionised, 2017 will see them normalised. Until now, streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon have felt like high-end curios, offering content with largely niche appeal. But two programmes have introduced online viewing to the mainstream.

The Grand Tour, a big-budget version of the BBC’s Top Gear, showed that such companies (in this case Amazon) could beat traditional broadcasters at their own game. The success of The Crown on Netflix has pushed even more significant boundaries.

Peter Morgan’s drama about the Royal family has attracted a different sort of subscriber – older, more conventional and less likely to adapt to new technologies. The series returns in 2017 and will fuel a trend for more streamed quality drama.

An affair to remember: F Scott Fitzgerald's relationship with his wife, Zelda, is explored in Z: The Beginning of Everything

Netflix is to air an adaptation of LM Montgomery’s classic Anne of Green Gables, while Amazon Prime has made Z: The Beginning of Everything, a drama about the love affair between F Scott Fitzgerald and his future wife Zelda.

That is not to say standard TV will die out. The success of The Missing, BBC One’s harrowing kidnap drama, proved there was still an appetite for the cliffhanger. Its creators, Harry and Jack Williams, are back in 2017 with another fiendishly plotted series, Rellik (“killer” spelt backwards) that will no doubt satisfy viewers’ demands for a storyline you have to study at an almost academic level.

The BBC is also making The Strike Series, based on JK Rowling’s crime novels (written under her pseudonym of Robert Galbraith). But more traditional drama will thrive. In January, ITV begins airing The Halcyon, an eight-part drama set at a London hotel in the Blitz.

Binge-watch culture is not confined to TV. The seeds are being sown in theatre

But the most pervasive trend of 2017 will be “geek TV”. Amazon and Netflix are commissioning shows that already have a large, dedicated fanbase. From January, Netflix will screen A Series of Unfortunate Events, based on the children’s books by Lemony Snicket and, later in the year, Amazon will show American Gods, an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s novel, which combines a thriller with Norse mythology.

The streaming services have budgets their more conventional rivals can only dream of (rumour has it that The Crown cost US$10million per episode) and such cinematic gloss blurs the boundaries between television and film.

But binge-watch culture is not confined to TV. The seeds are being sown in theatre. The “stage box set” – a marathon day of theatregoing – has already proved popular with productions such as the Donmar Warehouse’s all-female Shakespeare trilogy and Chichester Festival Theatre’s Chekhov season, proving audiences are happy to watch multiple hours of high-end drama.

Next summer, the RSC stages its Rome season, featuring Shakespeare’s four political, bloody plays set in the ancient world. But this trend is thriving in more populist work, too. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – a two-part play running to nearly six hours – has been the biggest money-spinner in theatrical history and its success will undoubtedly spawn imitations.

A mooted stage version of The Hunger Games was heading to Wembley in 2016 but has not yet materialised. But one thing is certain: there is a revolution waiting in the wings.

Art exhibitions in 2017: David Hockney, Russian Art at the Royal Academy and Pink Floyd

By Mark Hudson, Telegraph art critic

With the world in a state of higher tension than at any time since the Cold War, and Trump’s America determined – paradoxically – to cosy up to Putin’s Russia, the Royal Academy starts the year with two exhibitions that might have seemed a touch obscure but now feel suddenly extraordinarily topical.

On the one hand, we have the art of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. On the other, American painting from the Depression years of the 1930s.

Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932 looks at a period when political and artistic revolution went hand in hand – before Stalin’s crushing boot came down. This will be the first British exhibition to show the works of radical Russian modernists such as Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich, side by side with Stalinist social realism.

By contrast, there’s a downbeat, wistful spirit to American painting in the years after the Wall Street crash, but with stirrings of a new artistic radicalism. America after the Fall explores this fascinating period with a superb array of works by artists of the order of Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Hopper and the young Jackson Pollock.

The V&A follows up sell-out shows on David Bowie and Alexander McQueen with a show on Pink Floyd

Tate Britain pays an 80th birthday tribute to an artist who began his career as a radical outsider – a peroxide blond, overtly gay pop artist – and is now seen as the last word in reassuring Englishness: David Hockney.

The show brings together six decades of this much loved artist’s work, from Los Angeles swimming pools to Yorkshire landscapes.

Two doomed early 20th-century romantics will also be showcased in the autumn: Italy’s Amedeo Modigliani at Tate Modern and the Russian-Jewish painter Chaim Soutine at the Courtauld Gallery. Both died young in France: Modigliani in abject poverty and Soutine on the run from the Gestapo.

On the heels of Tate Modern’s ongoing blockbuster on American pop-art pioneer Robert Rauschenberg comes the Royal Academy’s exhibition of his close friend, rival and sometime lover, Jasper Johns.

The Victoria and Albert museum, meanwhile, follows up sell-out pop culture shows on David Bowie and Alexander McQueen with one set to be the most successful yet, featuring prog-rock giants Pink Floyd.

New theatre shows in 2017: The Glass Menagerie, Hamlet, Travesties and Hamilton

By Dominic Cavendish, Telegraph theatre critic

With Harry Potter and the Cursed Child now a megawatt hit that looks set to blaze bright in the West End for years, theatreland is proving a beacon of UK creative prowess in unsettled times, with some plays as much of a draw as big musicals.

The Cursed Child’s director, John Tiffany, now brings his finely measured revival of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie to the Duke of York’s Theatre (26 January to 29 April). Williams’ most autobiographical work and breakthrough play is a searing portrait of a young man burning to leave his claustrophobic home and dead-end job but guilt-tripped by his mother – played with aplomb by Broadway doyenne Cherry Jones – and emotionally tied to his shy sister.

Dark delights: Andrew Scott (Moriarty in Sherlock) will play Hamlet at the Almeida

A household name thanks to Moriarty inSherlock, Andrew Scott is giving us his Hamlet at the Almeida (17 February to 9 April). It’ll be murder getting tickets, but I’d wager on a West End transfer – it’s directed by that bankable whizz-kid, Robert Icke.

Another must-see revival comes in the form of the late Edward Albee’s masterpiece, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?, at the Harold Pinter Theatre (22 February to 27 May). Imelda Staunton, who seemingly can do no wrong, takes on Elizabeth Taylor’s role as caustic Martha, while Conleth Hill plays George, the drunken US academic immortalised by Richard Burton.

The moment Hamilton tickets go on sale get online immediately

Those wanting to give their grey cells a work-out should head for the West End transfer of Tom Stoppard’s comedy Travesties at the Apollo (3 February to 29 April), starring The Night Manager’s Tom Hollander. It’s a textbook-perfect account of a knowingly bamboozling play based on a real-life James Joyce saga in 1917.

Those in search of lighter relief should make for the Garrick (1 March to 10 June), where Griff Rhys Jones plays the Scrooge-like lead in Moliere’s classic, The Miser.

One final recommendation: the moment Hamilton tickets go on sale (30 January) get online immediately. Coming to the Victoria Palace theatre in November, this Tony award-lavished musical – Lin-Manuel Miranda’s multi-ethnic account of 18th-century US politician Alexander Hamilton – is a musical masterclass, with unmatchable braininess to boot.

Film releases in 2017: Blade Runner, Spider-Man and the Trainspotting sequel

By Tim Robey, Telegraph film critic

Going to the cinema in 2017 may feel a little like hopping into a DeLorean and reaching 88mph. The new year promises to take us back to the future – as far back as Blade Runner, say.

The 1982 film imagined 2019 Los Angeles as a smoggy junkyard. Earth’s climate has only got more toxic for the impending sequel,Blade Runner 2049, which again stars Harrison Ford, but this time is directed by Arrival's Denis Villeneuve instead of Ridley Scott.

Two decades on from when Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie and Spud first graced our screens – “disgraced” is perhaps the more apt word – they’re back, too, in T2: Trainspotting. Older perhaps but surely not wiser. The only character we won’t see returning is Kevin McKidd’s Tommy, but he has the pretty good excuse of being dead. It promises to be the first nostalgia trip in cinema that is simultaneously an acid trip.

Twenty years later: Spud (Ewen Bremner) and the gang return in T2: Trainspotting

Disney, meanwhile, continues its live-action makeovers of animated classics, following the gravy train of Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book, Maleficentand Cinderella. This time it’s Beauty and the Beast, which differs from those mainly in its determination to stay a musical – redeploying all of the original songs, and adding three new ones, courtesy of Alan Menken.

Bill (Dreamgirls) Condon looks like the right man for this job, and we’ll get to hear the pipes of Emma Watson as Belle, alongside Dan Stevens, Kevin Kline, Emma Thompson, Ian McKellen, Stanley Tucci and, as Gaston, the promisingly campy-macho Luke Evans.

Some franchises seem destined to reinvent themselves with ever narrower turnarounds – yep, there’s yet another Spider-Man redo, Homecoming, whose title hints at the superhero’s re-incorporation into the Marvel universe.

Will Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword obliterate sketchy memories of the Clive Owen version?

Sony’s brace of Amazing Spider-Mans, which didn’t do well enough to keep going, will soon become footnotes in blockbuster history, orphaned between Sam Raimi’s original trilogy and these new iterations.

Other, near-forgotten films leap back into our consciousness. You might have assumed that Joel Schumacher’s 1990 thriller Flatliners, about medical students rummaging around in the netherworld of near-death experiences, had been filed away as a cult curio. But here comes a sequel-remake-thing (reboot, let’s say) with Ellen Page and Diego Luna, from the director of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Are we dying for xXx: Return of Xander Cage, with Vin Diesel reprising his 2002 meathead? Will Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword obliterate sketchy memories of the Clive Owen version once and for all? And what else, besides Kong, will be found on Kong: Skull Island? Well, Tom Hiddleston, for starters.